Letty Lynton

1932, US, directed by Clarence Brown

Rating: ***.5

I must confess that I'd never even heard of Letty Lynton when the (now-unveiled) Siren advised us to pounce on the scratchy version that some kind soul posted to Youtube earlier in the year, and which has since disappeared once again. Letty Lynton is, as the Siren notes, "legendarily unavailable" due to a plagiarism dispute dating back to the 1930s. The resolution of that suit led MGM to withdraw the film from circulation, so goodness only knows what circuitous route the Youtube version travelled over the years. The film was huge in its day, with Joan Crawford's most impressive gown, by Adrian, provoking a boom in dress sales roughly opposite to the way that Clark Gable's unclad appearance in It Happened One Night caused undershirt sales to collapse.

Letty Lynton dates from before the introduction of the Production Code, and as such the themes and resolution are more openly adult than was subsequently to be the case. There's no ambiguity whatsoever in Letty's unmarried relationship at the opening of the film, for instance, while there's little in the way of moral condemnation of her actions either then or later in the action. That, indeed, is what most obviously marks the film as belonging to the pre-Code days. It's also a smartly directed bit of work, moving swiftly from South American club to ocean liner to New York glitz, and the film's climactic scene is brilliantly staged; there's a terrific shot of Joan Crawford as she darts back into the room at the end of the sequence. As I noted in the comments at the Siren's place, it's worth reading David Bordwell on the artistry of 1930s film production in tandem with Letty Lynton and other films of similar vintage, for he highlights the kinds of smart, underplayed artistic choices that were part of the fabric of studio filmmaking at the time.

The Terminator

1984, US, directed by James Cameron

Rating: ****

Although the visual effects for the scenes set in 2029 are almost quaint now - closer in spirit to Ray Harryhausen than to the CGI transformations of which James Cameron has been a key supporter - the core of The Terminator remains intact: a trim, single-minded chase movie which ably builds on the heritage of genre cinema. The reference points to John Carpenter's movies are particularly obvious, whether in the set-piece assault on a police precinct or the tense sequence with Sarah Connor's roommate which recalls something of Halloween.

Like Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break a few years later, what's critical in the action sequences is Cameron's sense of placement, and our consequent awareness of the physical peril in which his characters find themselves as their cars and bodies whip across the screen. The script, too, is smart, and indeed smarter than in several of Cameron's subsequent, longer films: it's taciturn for the most part, particularly when it comes to Arnold Schwarzenegger's eponymous character, but witty in dealing with the problems that confront Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) when he must not only present Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) with an outlandish tale but must also ensure she believes him to be entirely serious and sane.

Deux

France, directed by Claude Zidi

Rating: **

Deux earned Claude Zidi a full review and an interview in Cahiers du cinéma after fifteen years of directing popular comedies that barely rated a mention in that august journal, and I had the impression before seeing the film that Zidi had somehow played the Cahiers "game" by making the kind of film that might be expected to appeal to the magazine's writers. The final product, however, seems in many ways as broad as most of his other projects - with the style and content less suited to each other on this occasion.

The film conceived as something of a reflection on modern love - the way people interact now, or rather the way they did in 1980s Paris - although Deux takes the form of a melodramatic fable chronicling the encounter between music promoter Marc (Gérard Depardieu) and real estate agent Hélène (Maruschka Detmers) rather than a realist anatomy of relationships. Cahiers compares Zidi's work on the film favourably to American studio directors of the 1930s like Leo McCarey, but his tonal shifts are far less fleet of foot and he's rather heavy-handed with the use of camera and music to underline his characters' emotions (one crane shot over the Canal Saint-Martin drip with the clichés of the romantic comedy rather than serving as an insight into Marc's situation). Once the film decamps to the suburbs, Zidi attempts to invoke the anti-bourgeois attitudes of Claude Chabrol, for whom he worked as a camera operator throughout the 1960s, but without little of that director's more incisive social commentary. Indeed, Marc's reaction to the idea of a meeting with the parents - indeed his behaviour when confronted with any notion of convention - comes across as an (apparently unintentional) parody of Chabrol.

Zidi's primary point is that modern romance is a series of negotiations, in the business sense - negotiations about time, money, property, priorities - and both characters accept this basic premise even if they need to engage in negotiations to come up with mutually acceptable merger terms. It's fortunate, then, that they encounter one another, but there's no sense in which these characters might reveal wider social truths, even their verbal sparring is at times quite enjoyable (Depardieu in particular seems to relish some of his lines, although the Cahiers comparison with the jousts of the likes of Tracy/Hepburn/Grant only reveals this film's relative impoverishment). Indeed, it's precisely any sense of relationship with the real, lived world that the film lacks: several of Zidi's earlier films, L'Aile ou la cuisse or Les Ripoux for instance, have at least some anchor in the actual time and place where they are set, even given their broad plotting and characterization.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

2006, Japan, directed by Mamoru Hosoda

Rating: ****

I'm not all that familiar with the conventions of anime, so it was useful to have a pre-screening introduction from two local academics - MIT's Ian Condry and Susan Napier from Tufts - in order to get a few pointers. They both focused on the inspiration behind many anime films, as well as the kinds of characters seen in anime - young woman endowed with unusual powers, for instance, as seen in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. As useful as that scene-setting was, I wouldn't have minded hearing something about the aesthetics of anime too, and particularly the apparent "disconnect" between the fairly simple character drawings and the often beautifully complex backgrounds (there are several excellent montage sequences where the animators really get to show their artistic skill, and I love the repeated images of the city skyline, as in the above still, in which traffic inches along the highway). Equally striking are director Mamoru Hosoda's assured shifts in tone - from tense sequences with cross-cutting action to very amusing exploitations of the film's time-shifting plotline to a poignant conclusion.

(The only downside with the screening was the fact that the white subtitles were almost invisible against pale backgrounds - a particular problem given that many conversation scenes took place on a dusty baseball diamond).

Point Break

1991, US, directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Rating: ***

With the advent of mobile phones and the Internet, films from the 1990s, especially cop/FBI films, seem extraordinarily quaint in some respects just fifteen years on, but Kathryn Bigelow's flick retains virtually all of its freshness given her breakneck pacing, contempt for procedural detail, and kinetic action construction. Although there are aspirations to something more than just another high-energy film through the deconstruction of action tropes and the riffing on the not-always-that-subtle-to-start-with gay subtext of many a male-bonding flick, what really marks the film as different is the sheer adrenaline on display: Bigelow makes you feel as though the action is real both by asking her actors to take unusual risks - they jump out of planes and surf big waves - but by cutting her shots together so that we're always aware of where the characters are and whether or not they're in peril. She has a terrific sense of space, and an ability to convey that to the audience; that's something at least as valuable as any effort to comment on the action genre more broadly, since I'm not always convinced she's telling us things we hadn't known before (it's hard to imagine anyone watching, to give just one example, the slow-motion-in-the-rain antics of Lethal Weapon, four years earlier, without at least wondering about the "subtext").

The Haunting

1963, US, directed by Robert Wise

Rating: ***

As much as I admired Robert Wise's direction - his sense of pace and the rhythm of movement from longer shots to extreme close-ups are both exceptional - and the idea of a haunting that's grounded both in the physical (a haunted house) and the psychological (a troubled, perhaps susceptible woman in whose imagination the entire film may well be happening), I still found myself somehow on the outside looking in, not so much unconvinced as perhaps left a touch cold by Wise's very measured, even scientific gaze.

There's human suffering to spare - both in flashback and in the very vivid present of the film - and I had the sense that the filmmaker was sitting there observing, fascinated, but never compelled to intervene. It's an unsettling feeling, and perhaps ultimately a matter of taste; I found, for instance, the directorial gaze in Requiem warmer, more humane, even if that film makes no more attempt to provide a final "explanation" for the extraordinary story it narrates.

That said, The Haunting remains full of extraordinary moments: a woman tumbling backward down a staircase (the shot is quite brilliant, the camera towering over her and creating a sense that the twenty or so steps are stretching away to infinity), a close-up of Nell's face (or rather Julie Harris's face) as she cowers terrified in her bed, the camera prowling around the edge of a door from which unearthly sounds emerge, or even just the exquisitely careful placement of characters in the shot as they all await who knows what fate.

The Damned United

2009, UK, directed by Tom Hooper

Rating: ***.5

Peter Morgan seems the obvious choice to adapt David Peace's novel about Brian Clough's brief 1974 tenure at the helm of Leeds United for the screen, given that he's produced a string of scripts imagining the backstories of real characters and events. Although the film has the air of reality about it, with statistics from various league seasons appearing on the screen, and individual matches dramatized with reasonable fidelity, Morgan has relatively little interest in the details of the actual chronology. Like all of his scripts, this is about power dynamics - between manager and boardroom, rival managers, or boss and underling (most of all the latter, given the unique real-life relationship between Clough and his longtime assistant Peter Taylor).

Despite all of the factual manipulations - Clough's stint as manager of Brighton and Hove Albion becomes Taylor's stint at the same club, for dramatic purposes - Morgan and Hooper tap into something essential about the standing of English football in the 1970s, when an Irish player was about as exotic as the imports got (Clough persistently addresses Johnny Giles simply as "Irish"). They've a great sense of the details of football of the period - the crumbling venues, the appalling pitch conditions, the ashtrays and orange segments in the dressing room, Jimmy Hill's chin on Match of the Day - and yet those are ultimately only the backdrop against which a story of ambition almost Shakespearean in contour plays itself out, as Clough tries to extricate himself from the shadow of Revie in order to construct the mythology he feels himself to be worthy of.

Hooper's eye for detail extends to the film's visual scheme, starting with the witty title shot, and extending through the use of weather and light as a way into Clough's mind. The sun during a triumphal visit to Spain seems as though it's been turned up an extra notch (just as many a Brit, suffering through the greyest months, probably experienced it at the time), while the northern rain washes away any joy in life and the depths of night in Clough's lonely hotel room are a literal long night of the soul during which the man edges toward at least temporary madness. Morgan and Hooper also do a fine job of conveying Clough's ahead-of-his-time sense of the growing importance of television as a means of setting the agenda, and even now Clough's extraordinary, preening on-camera persona remains virtually unique among managers in the English game.

L'Enfance nue

1968, France, directed by Maurice Pialat

Rating: ****.5

Although it's a little rough around the narrative edges in the concluding segment - the protagonist's final transformation seems abrupt, signaling a more radical change in character for which we haven't been fully prepared - Pialat's L'Enfance nue is an extraordinary feature début, a film of deceptive simplicity that's both visually compelling and politically bracing (I suspect Pialat wouldn't have found much merit in criticisms of the narrative progression, in any case).

Pialat's pursuit of a clear sense of place and time is announced in the opening images, depicting a union march, presumably an actual event, before transitioning to the story of a young boy moving through the fostering system. In many respects, Pialat's primary fascination is with France's institutions and the way in which the country treats its citizens and, indeed, makes them into citizens in the first place. He provides a detailed depiction of the world of fostering and child services, making clear both the problems and benefits - to the foster parents - of the system (and using real childcare workers as actors). That portrait prefigures, among other things, the school scenes in his subsequent work, the First World War mini-series La Maison des bois, scenes that are again about the ways in which the state instills ideas of citizenship.

Equally striking is Pialat's deeply humane view of his characters, and his avoidance of miserabilism even while acknowledging the difficult, financially strained lives he depicts. There's an exceptional warmth to the way in which he captures many of the conversations, an ear for the rhythms that sustain life - the courtesies and moments of humour that pepper every day (the two old women laughing over the discovery of a skin magazine, or the scene in which one of the women sings, in a quavering voice, songs of her youth). That ear for dialogue and the "privileged moment" finds its visual counterpart in Pialat's ability to direct the eye to unexpected splashes of colour - as seen in the yellow, blue or green in the stills above, for instance, or the careful composition of the shot below, with a band of brightness sandwiched between dark hats and grey skies. There's nothing heavy-handed about this use of colour, grounded in Pialat's training as a painter, but it equally gives the lie to the idea that there's something artless about his work.